Isolation of human glomerular basement membrane antigens by affinity chromatography utilising Goodpasture's kidney antibody eluates

Abstract

The soluble material produced from a 96-hour digest of sonicated human glomerular basement membranes with purified collagenase was shown to contain at least 12 components by sodium dodecyl sulphate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis with molecular weights ranging from 20 x 10(3) to greater than 200 x 10(3) daltons. Five of these components produced antigenic peaks after two-dimensional immunoelectrophoresis into agar plates containing rabbit antiserum to the solubilised glomerular basement membrane. Two groups of antigenic components were demonstrated in these gels by two-dimensional immunoelectrophoresis autoradiographic techniques utilising 125I-labelled collagenase-digested human glomerular basement membranes reacted with antibodies eluted at acid pH from the kidney of the Goodpasture's patient. This acid eluate was shown to contain contaminants of alpha 1-antitrypsin and albumin co-eluting with the antibodies bound to the glomerular basement membrane. After removal of these contaminants, the antibodies were linked to cyanogen bromide-activated Sepharose and used to affinity purify four antigenic fractions from the collagenase-digested glomerular basement membrane. These fractions were eluted by 0.2 M glycine pH 2.8 and with 0.5 M ammonium thiocyanate and had molecular weights of 22-25, 43-45, 65-70 and 205 x 10(3) daltons. The smaller molecular weight components were shown to be common to both included and excluded fractions obtained by Ultragel AcA 44 chromatography of the digested material in 10 mM phosphate pH 8. This suggests that the larger molecular weight component would be an aggregate of a smaller component. Preliminary carbohydrate and amino acid analyses indicated that the different elution procedures elicited antigens with different chemical characteristics.